Interesting, but as messed up as our AOE currently is, can you see them coming up with three viable talents that apply to all specs?

Level 45 Talents

Arcane Potency
Passive

Your Arcane Barrage and Ice Lance spells will strike up to 4 additional targets within 10 yards of the primary target for 50% of their damage. In addition, your Pyroblast spell will explode on impact, dealing 25% of its damage to 4 targets within 10 yards of the primary target.

Master of Elements
Passive

Arcane: Your Blizzard spell becomes Nether Tempest. Allows you to summon a Nether Tempest at the target location, which will deal X Arcane damage every second to three targets within 10 yards of the Tempest for 12 seconds. Nether Tempest damage is increased by your Arcane Charges, and will consume all Arcane Charges. Up to three Nether Tempests can be active at one time.

Fire: Your Blizzard spell becomes Leaping Flame. You launch a gout of flame at a target, dealing X Fire damage and then jumping to a nearby enemy target within 10 yards, never hitting the same target twice and hitting up to a maximum of 20 targets. Leaping Flame's damage is increased by 50% if you have an a Fire based damage over time effect active on the target. Leaping Flame requires Hot Streak to cast.

Frost: Your Blizzard spell's damage is increased by 25% and no longer needs to be channeled, but has an 8 second cooldown. Furthermore, casting Ice Lance while Blizzard is active will cause the Ice Lance to strike all targets affected by the Blizzard, dividing damage between them.

Meteor
1.2% of Base Mana 40 Yard Range
Instant Cast 30 sec cooldown

Calls down a powerful meteor to strike an area, dealing X damage to all targets within a 10 yard radius of the meteor. The meteor's appearance and damage type will be appropriate to your spec.

----

This is just a concept, mind you. This tier is designed to offer different types of AoE improvement: Arcane Potency offers cleave damage, Master of Elements offers sustained AoE improvement, while Meteor would ideally offer burst AoE for dealing with large packs of low health adds.

Brainstorming Mage ideas

If we're going to brainstorm Mage ideas, here are my thoughts for a total rework of the entire class. Inscription has always been an awkward profession, as it kind of serves the same purpose as the talent tree (namely, augmenting certain abilities and having to choose from a wide variety of options). I propose a rework of Inscription such that every spell now has three unique glyphs that will augment or change it somewhat, reducing the choice from between three major/minor glyphs to a choice between a single glyph for each spell, kind of like the Diablo III system. (As you will see, I have an ulterior motive for this: glyphed properly, a Mage can resurrect the long-dead Elementalist spec.)

Originally Posted by MMO-Champion

Mage (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)ARCANEMastery: Mana Adept - Increases all spell damage done by up to X%, based on the amount of mana the Mage has unspent.Core Spells

Glyph of Clearcast - Your Arcane Blast has a 10% chance to not consume mana.

Glyph of Empowered Blast - Your Arcane Blast has a 10% chance to generate an extra Arcane Charge. This extra Charge can exceed the usual Charge limit by 1.

Glyph of Mental Fluidity - Your Arcane Blast has a 10% chance to make your next Arcane Blast instant-cast.

Arcane Charge - An arcane charge, generated by Arcane Blast and Arcane Explosion, and consumed by Arcane Barrage and Arcane Missiles. Stacks up to 4. Decrements by 1 after 10 seconds if no charge is generated or restored.

Arcane Blast
Generates a charge.
Arcane Blast's damage is increased by 50% per charge, and its mana cost increased by 150% per charge.

Arcane Missiles
Consumes a charge
Arcane Missiles' damage is increased by 50% per charge. An extra charge is consumed if the caster moves while channeling missiles.

Arcane Explosion
Refreshes charges and has a 30% chance to generate a charge if at least one target is hit. Damage increased by 25% per charge.

Arcane Barrage
Consumes all charges.
Arcane Barrage's damage is increased by 50% per charge, and it hits 1 additional nearby targets per charge for 50% damage.

Arcane Missiles - 40 yard range. Channeled. Launches five waves of Arcane Missiles at the enemy over 2 sec, causing X Arcane damage per wave. Restores 3% of the caster's total mana. Consumes an Arcane Charge. Consumes an additional Arcane Charge if the caster moves while channeling this spell.

Glyph of Uncontainable Power - Your direct damage spells also proc Arcane Explosion during Arcane Power on a target snared by your Slow.

Glyph of Overwhelming Power - You can temporarily store up to six Arcane Charges during Arcane Power.

Glyph of Inexorable Power - Your direct damage spells deal damage as though you had one more Arcane Charge during Arcane Power.

My design with the overhauled Arcane spec would be to place all of the mana management within the spec itself and divorce it from the level 90 talents. I also wanted to remove the slight random element present in Arcane Missile procs; the design goal was to give the player the entire rope to hang himself. If you play the spec badly, it should be unforgiving. If you play the spec well, it should perform well. I also tried to reduce (but not entirely eliminate) the movement penalty. Important changes:

- Arcane charges now decay one charge at a time after 10 seconds instead of losing the entire stack. This should help with ramp-up issues in dungeons and soloing. More importantly, an Arcane Charge now restores mana when used by Arcane Missiles or dumped by Arcane Barrage. Otherwise, its core functionality remains the same.
- Arcane Missiles now consume a charge instead of generating a charge and are no longer procs; instead, you can cast it at any time that you have at least one Arcane Charge. Moving while you have at least one more charge will consume an extra charge instead of breaking the channel. Missiles should hit harder than Blast at all levels of Arcane charges, but reduce your charge instead of generating more.
- Arcane Barrage is still a potent charge dump. Its CD has been increased to 15 seconds, but it should now hit very hard - mages should want to cast this spell to end a burn phase or to squeeze out PvP burst.
- PvP utility is baked into Arcane Barrage via the glyphs. This also means that the CD had to be increased drastically - being able to stun an opponent every three seconds in PvP is not acceptable.
- Arcane Blast's cast time has been reduced to decrease its PvP vulnerability, although the danger of being locked out of your Arcane school remains. It also means you have a faster ramp-up. The glyphs for Arcane Blast should feel like a small buff, but not a rotation changer.
- Arcane Power is a potent CD to be used during burn, and should change your rotation.

Originally Posted by MMO-Champion

Mage (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)FIREMastery: Ignite - Your target burns for an additional 12% over 4 sec of the total direct damage caused by your Fireball, Ice Lance, Inferno Blast, Scorch, and Pyroblast. If this effect is reapplied, any remaining damage will be added to the new Ignite.Core Spells

Glyph of Wildfire - Your Pyroblast places a second damage over time effect on a nearby enemy within 10 yards of the target.

Glyph of Blazing Streak - Your Pyroblast consumes only two charges of Hot Streak or Fingers of Frost when instantly cast.

Glyph of High Heat - While the Pyroblast damage over time is present on your targets, they take 15% increased damage from Living Bomb.

Living Bomb - The target becomes a Living Bomb, taking X Fire damage over 12 sec. When this effect ends, or the target dies, it explodes to deal an additional X Fire damage to up to all enemies within 10 yards. Limit 3 targets.

Glyph of Spicule - Your Living Bomb strikes a target within 10 yards for X Fire damage per tick.

Glyph of Volcano - Your Living Bomb causes an eruption that knocks the target into the air when it explodes. Against targets immune to this effect it instead generates a charge of Hot Streak.

Glyph of Corona - Your Living Bomb pulses X Fire damage to all enemy targets within 10 yards per tick.

If the target is currently affected by your damage over time effects, it also creates a new damage over time with the damage per second of all your other damage over time effects combined that ticks for 1 second every 10 seconds.

When cast, resets the cooldown of your Inferno Blast ability.

Glyph of Spontaneous Combustion - Turns Combustion into a passive effect which has a 10% chance to proc off any critical hit from your direct damage spells. These combustions deal 25% of unglyphed damage and do not stun the target.

Inferno Blast - 2% of base mana. 40 yard range. Instant. 8 sec. cooldown. Blasts the enemy for X Fire damage, and is guaranteed to critical strike. Upon impact, it spreads any Fireball, Pyroblast, Ignite, Living Bomb, and Combustion damage over time effects to up to all nearby enemy targets within 12 yards.

I didn't want to change the gameplay of Fire too much, but I wanted to bring back the sense that Fire's job is really to just burn up everything in sight as a heavy dot-cleaving and damage over time spec with powerful AoE. Many of the glyphs reflect this, adding an AoE component or cleave to single-target spells. Hot Streak's functionality was changed to hopefully alleviate the frustration of running into long dry spells - instead of requiring two back-to-back crits, it now functions as a stack where a critical strike procs a charge and permits firing an instant Pyroblast at three charges (up from two charges because it might be too powerful at two charges). A non-crit following a crit will no longer set you back to square one. Due to this extra leniency, Critical Mass has been removed.

Some of the target caps were also removed, namely, Inferno Blast has returned to splashing the DoTs onto all nearby enemies, and Living Bomb explosions can now hit all enemies in their blast radius. Otherwise Fire remains mostly the same - lots of DoTs, powerful AoE, high mobility, and a strong proc.

You may also notice that Pyroblast's tooltip notes that it can consume charges of Hot Streak or Fingers of Frost. Similarly, Ignite now benefits Fingers of Frost. More on this later.

I feel as though my design doesn't really fix the problem where Fire scales out of control very well. Ideally, Mastery could be strengthened vis-a-vis haste and crit, with less emphasis on haste and crit.

Glyph of Piercing Ice - Your Frostbolt spells decreases the cooldown of Icy Veins by 1.5 seconds, Frozen Orb by 1 second, and Deep Freeze by 1 second per cast.

Fingers of Frost - Your successful Frostbolts, Frostfire Bolts and Frozen Orb hits have a 15% chance, your Blizzard ticks have a 5% chance, and your Deathfrost channel has a 15% per tick to grant you Fingers of Frost.

The Fingers of Frost effect causes your next Ice Lance, Pyroblast, Blizzard, or Deep Freeze to act as if your target were frozen, and increases Ice Lance damage by 25% for 15 sec.

Deathfrost - 40 yard range. Channels a stream of ice cold water at your target, dealing X Frost damage over 4 seconds and slowing their movement by 60%. Has a 10% chance to proc off any spell that did not treat your target as Frozen.

Glyph of Glacier - Your Deathfrost also strikes all hostile targets between you and your target for 50% damage while channeled.

Glyph of Brain Freeze - Your Deathfrost freezes and stuns the target for 3 seconds if it successfully completes its channel.

Summon Water Elemental - 3% of base mana. 1.5 sec. cast. 1 min. cooldown. Summon a Water Elemental to fight for the caster.

Casting Frostbolt on your Water Elemental will heal it for X.

Glyph of Persistent Water - Grants your Water Elemental a 5% to generate Fingers of Frost charges or Deathfrost procs when Waterbolt hits its target.

Glyph of Pure Water - Your Water Elemental restores 1% of total mana per second to all group or raid members within 30 yards.

Glyph of Distilled Water - Grants your Water Elemental the Water Jet ability, which channels a stream of water onto the target for 5 seconds. While Water Jet is active, your Frostbolt spells and Deathfrost ticks will always grant a Fingers of Frost charge if they strike the Water Jet target.

Shatter - Your critical chance against Frozen targets is doubled and then increased by another 50%.

While Fire shifted away somewhat from the proc model (and Arcane shifted almost entirely away from it), Frost in this design embraces procs. However, currently Frost has two procs which both grant instant-cast spells (Brain Freeze and Fingers of Frost), so I decided to scrap Brain Freeze for Deathfrost, which is also a proc but is a channeled spell. Like Missile Barrage from Wrath, this is a spell you will want to cast when it's up, as it deals high Frost damage while being channeled on the target. Deathfrost forces the Frost mage to stand still while channeling, requiring a PvP sacrifice between mobility and damage. It only has a chance to proc off spells that are not targeted at Frozen enemies, or enemies treated as Frozen. The design is that if you cannot find windows in PvP for Shatter burst or get a bad lack of Fingers procs in PvE, Deathfrost will compensate for that difference. A second goal of this redesign was to bandage the haste and crit soft caps of Frost by replacing an instant spell with a channeled spell and making Crit more valuable. Mastery now increases your critical damage, also important for Mages who will be playing Elementalist under this design.

Slow - 1% of base mana. 35 yard range. Instant. Reduces target's movement speed by 50%, and increases casting time by 50% (25% on player targets) for 15 sec. Slow can only affect one target at a time.

Glyph of Quagmire - Your Slow spell also slows enemy movement speed by 30% for all enemies within 10 yards of its target.

Glyph of Torment the Weak - Your Arcane Blast applies Slow to your target, if no other target is already affected by Slow.

Glyph of Heal Siphon - Your Slow spell reduces the target's healing taken by 25%, and heals you instead for that 25% of incoming healing.

Blink - 2% of base mana. Instant. 15 second cooldown. Teleports the caster 20 yards forward, unless something is in the way. Also frees the caster from stuns and bonds.

Glyph of Improved Blink - You move 70% faster for 3 seconds after using Blink.

Glyph of Blurred Speed - You have a 30% chance for 3 seconds to dodge hostile attacks after using Blink.

Glyph of Wink - You can Blink twice before incurring a cooldown.

Counterspell - 2% of base mana. 40 yard range. Instant. 28 sec. cooldown. Counters the enemy's spellcast, preventing any spell from that school of magic from being cast for 6 sec. Silences the target for 4 sec.

Arcane Explosion - 3% of base mana. Instant. Arcane only. Causes an explosion of arcane magic around the caster, causing X Arcane damage to all targets within 10 yards. Refreshes Arcane Charges and has a 30% chance to generate an Arcane Charge, if at least one target is hit.

The functionality of most of Arcane's spells has been kept, with the exception of Evocation (which has been decried by many mages as an outdated mechanic and an unnecessary anchor) and baked into Mana gem. To give Mages some much-needed raidwide utility, Mages can now conjure a Mana Fount which hands out Mana Gems to the rest of the raid, with glyphs that change how mana is restored. Extra functionality in the form of glyphs has also been added to some of our other spells, notably bringing back some of the former Polymorph tier. To balance Counterspell, its cooldown has been raised to 28 seconds. It is also hoped that Slow will be more useful in PvP and situationally useful in PvE.

I made the unpopular decision to restrict Flamestrike to Fire, Blizzard to Frost, and Arcane Explosion to Arcane. Arcane Explosion should be the primary AoE of Arcane mages, although Arcane Barrage can also serve when it is off cooldown. Flamestrike interacts with Frost spells and Blizzard with Fire spells when talented into Elementalist mage, but need to be restricted to their respective schools in order to limit gamebreaking glyphs.

Clearcasting - Passive: Your direct damage spells have a 10% chance to generate a single Mirror Phantasm that will duplicate your spellcasts on your target for 10% damage. Stacks up to 3 Mirror Phantasms. Lasts 25 seconds. Active: Sacrifices your Phantasm with the least remaining uptime for a spec-dependent resource. 10 sec. cooldown on this ability.

Mark of Flame - You transform into a fiery Phoenix, granting 25% increased crit chance, haste, critical damage, and mastery. You burn for 8% of your total health every second and healing effects on you are reduced by 50%. After 12 seconds, or when your health is depleted, the effect expires and you revert to the health you had when you assumed Phoenix form. 3 min. cooldown.

Master of Elements - (Arcane) Your spells have an 8% chance to instantly duplicate the spellcast at no additional cost. (Fire) Fireball is replaced by Frostfire Bolt. You can now cast Blizzard. You now have Fingers of Frost. Pyroblast can use either Hot Streak stacks or Finger of Frost procs to satisfy its cast condition. You also gain Frost's Mastery at 50% reduced efficiency. (Frost) Frostbolt is replaced by Frostfire Bolt. You can now cast Flamestrike. You can now cast Combustion. You also gain Fire's Mastery at 50% reduced efficiency.

These are some designs for replacing our current final tier. They probably all have flaws.

Clearcasting should be balanced on the assumption that the mage will very rarely have all three Mirror Phantasms up and is a direct damage increase. Mirror Phantasms will cast whatever you cast, and can be sacrificed for spec resources (e.g., an Arcane Charge for Arcane Mages, a Hot Streak stack for Fire Mages, and a Fingers of Frost proc for Frost mages).

Mark of Flame provides heavy burst and is probably unacceptable due to PvP reasons. I've tried to balance this, not entirely satisfactorily, by forcing the mage to sacrifice health while the effect is active (meaning burn the bird down if you see a mage turn into one in PvP and get him to revert to mage).

Master of Elements is the talent that enables a Frost or Fire mage to play as Elementalist, while providing a Tarecgosa passive for Arcane mages. Fire elementalists should gain increased Crit damage, reduced Ignite damage (note that Ignite does NOT benefit Frostfire Bolt), maintain powerful AoE damage with Flamechill-glyphed Blizzard after spreading DoTs, and should feel as though they maintain the burn-everything-up style of Fire while dipping into Frost for more frequent instant Pyroblasts. Frost elementalists should feel that their spec still revolves around procs, but now they gain a DoT bonus by dipping into Fire since Ice Lances cause Ignite and they can now use Combustion, as well as a very potent AoE by alternating Flamestrike with Blizzard.

In Summary
- Arcane Mages should have a more complex and dynamic rotation with mana management tools baked into the spells themselves and all randomness removed except for a small variation on Arcane Blast's glyphs (movement will be your random factor). Missiles are no longer procs and can be cast if you have at least one Charge. Missiles restore a small amount of mana. For burn phases, use Missiles at high charges; for conserve phases, use Missiles at lower charges. Use Barrage for higher overall DPS at the cost of drinking your mana. If you need to move, spend an extra Arcane charge to channel Missiles - or just use Barrage. Use Arcane Power for extra burn.
- Fire Mages should have their randomness smoothed out by the new Hot Streak mechanic. Critical Mass removed. DoT cleave and AoE power ramped up. Fire should feel like a "burn everything in sight" spec.
- Frost Mages should feel like a high critical hit, proc-management spec. Water Elemental utility improved. PvP burst toned down with removal of Brain Freeze. A channeled spell added that is cast when procced and balanced to appear less often when lots of Fingers are available.
- Final tier talents should feel more like meaningful DPS bonuses rather than management buffs.
- Elementalist Fire sacrifices some DoT damage for more procs and higher crits by raising the proc bank for instant Pyroblasts.
- Elementalist Frost sacrifices some proc rate and lower proc casts in return for gaining DoTs.
- Both elementalist specs should feel that you are using frost and flame in seamless tandem during ST and AoE rotation.

Just some ideas to play with.

... This took way too long to type.

Originally Posted by Shangalar

Since this thread is supposed to have a long and happy life until and throughout the Beta of the next expansion, I will make it STICKY. This means that if you write something uniquely ridiculous, even more people than usual will see it and laugh at you.

FML

Last edited by TacTican; 2013-04-05 at 03:43 PM.
Reason: Added a tl;dr section

How you've decided to go with glyphs as several strong DPS options so that there is a choice is interesting but think that the balancing on that is unlikely to work, there are always going to be three mathematically superior choices from the selection provided

Idea nr.2: Mastery should increase mana regen, not damage: more mastery=more agressive cycles. I admit its not a good idea, as arcane would be bad in the start of a new expansion and could be god at the end.

If mastery increases mana regen instead of damage based on mana then the entire point of managing mana becomes pointless as well. Unless we get another passive which would work like the current mastery, just with a fixed value.

But then Mastery would become for Arcane what Crit is for Fire now - a stat which allows us to go from zero damage in patch X.1 to stupidly OP in X.4.

The current Mastery is really good, we're just looking at how to play with it more than we do now. That's at least my idea. No harm in tossing ideas back and forth though, we're here to discuss everything.

I don't play a lot of mage, but when I do its my frost mage, she always has been and always will be a frost mage. what annoys me is that the talent tree covers all 3 specs. I think that the talent tree should 'change' per spec. all of the abilities would remain the same but the names and graphics would change to suit the spec.

at the moment I take all of the frost/ice talents because these fit my frost mage, I might, however, prefer to take nether tempest or living bomb, but both of these are not very frosty spells...

If mastery increases mana regen instead of damage based on mana then the entire point of managing mana becomes pointless as well. Unless we get another passive which would work like the current mastery, just with a fixed value.

But then Mastery would become for Arcane what Crit is for Fire now - a stat which allows us to go from zero damage in patch X.1 to stupidly OP in X.4.

The current Mastery is really good, we're just looking at how to play with it more than we do now. That's at least my idea. No harm in tossing ideas back and forth though, we're here to discuss everything.

this is what i propose to changing our mastery

Originally Posted by Soulstrike

arcane mastery- i would like this mastery to be changed to flat damage bonus per arcane charge. so as your arcane charge is higher the higher the mastery benefit from its effect something like that instead of "at full mana" 1% damage increase at 1 charge, 2% at 2 charge, 3% at 3 charge and 4% at 4charge (maybe 1,2,4,6 i dunno number can be solved later :P) so basically the idea behind this mastery is the bigger your mana at the start of burn the bigger the burst damage you will do, oh and you dont even have to keep your eye on DO I HAVE CLOSE TO 100% mana stuff :/ (and obviously evocate back to full mana for the conserve phase 2min cd or even 1.5)

more on page one zzzzz im keen to hear more arcane changes from people more info is welcome loving alot of ideas so far

@Tactican i looked at your arcane stuff and the idea concept is nice but where is the synergy of arcane rotation???

your rotation design sounds alot like ROP ceoncept where you are at all full 99.9% of the time zzzzzz AB,AB,AB,AB,ABarr,AB,AB,AB,AB,AM,AM,AM ect

your rotation will somewhat feels like fire/frost rotation (hit this button every so often and does big damage concept), in this example is your 15s CD arcane barrage

i personally havent looked at pvp design of arcane yet (in page 1) but your ideas of glyph sounds really fun and interesting. (i do like the stun with barrage depending on # of charges)

Part of the design goal was to make Arcane Barrage actually useful to cast by making it hit harder and apply a boss debuff or a PvP snare, but then you have to compete with Arcane Missiles also draining Arcane Charges (and draining even more charges if you move). That being said, you're probably right and I suspect the problem is the current Arcane Mastery - I remember Swizzle pointed out, WAAAAAYY back in the Cata pre-patch, that Mana Adept was kind of like a more binary Torment the Weak: either it was so strong that keeping mana up at 100% became a top priority, or it was irrelevant.

Activating Arcane Power should be a rotation-changer, not sure if I implemented it correctly.

I'll keep iterating the design. I rather like this brainstorming session we have going on.

Originally Posted by Imnick

How you've decided to go with glyphs as several strong DPS options so that there is a choice is interesting but think that the balancing on that is unlikely to work, there are always going to be three mathematically superior choices from the selection provided

This is also what I was afraid of. Inscription is just ... kind of clunky overall. In Cata it felt like there weren't any real choices, in Mists I feel like I don't have any real choices, and looking at this idea of mine ... it does feel like a lot of glyphs would be glaringly obvious (for example, if you pick Master of Elements as the final tier talent, taking the Elementalist glyphs for Flamestrike and Blizzard would be a no-brainer).

If mastery increases mana regen instead of damage based on mana then the entire point of managing mana becomes pointless as well. Unless we get another passive which would work like the current mastery, just with a fixed value.

But then Mastery would become for Arcane what Crit is for Fire now - a stat which allows us to go from zero damage in patch X.1 to stupidly OP in X.4.

The current Mastery is really good, we're just looking at how to play with it more than we do now. That's at least my idea. No harm in tossing ideas back and forth though, we're here to discuss everything.

The notion of managing mana as a DPS class is flawed in of itself; there is very little incentive to ever do less than maximum DPS, as opposed to being able to run out of mana as a healer or overheal.

The simplest fix for the Arcane rotation is to try and resurrect the burn phase cycle from Cataclysm. While this model's problem was that Arcane Blast accounted for a ridiculous percentage of the damage, the good thing about it was that it gave Arcane a niche of providing competitive sustained DPS while stationary, but also massive burst when required for fights like Ragnaros and Spine.

The present Arcane rotation is a relatively good one for a conserve phase, as it offers a good disrtribution between our three primary spells. The level between the conserve and burn rotations should be Arcane Power, with Evocation being returned on its 2 minute cooldown to enable quick recovery after a burn phase.

One thing we might look at changing is the role of Arcane Missiles in order to enable short burn phases outside of the Arcane Power + Evocation cycle; a variation of the old "Orb Phase" when Flame Orb was used to force AM procs and creating a mana positive rotation. The change might go this way.

- Arcane Missiles is castable 100% of the time, but no longer generates Arcane Charges.
- Your damaging spells have a 40% chance to proc Missile Barrage, increasing the damage of your next Arcane Missiles spell by x% and causing it to generate an Arcane Charge.

Alternatively, the solution might be to introduce a new rotational spell which actually generates mana rather than consumes it. As said, what is so elegant about the Wizard gameplay style in D3 is that it has the interchange between less powerful spells that generate resources and heavy hitters that consume it.

---------- Post added 2013-04-05 at 08:55 AM ----------

Originally Posted by Soulstrike

this is what i propose to changing our mastery

The easiest Mastery change, I believe, is making Mastery increase the damage bonus provided by Arcane Charge.

Mastery in itself is a pretty stupid stat and I don't know why they introduced it.

The problem with this is the whole "bring the player not the class" garbage; it would make Mages far too desirable in a raid setting.

The raid cooldowns I think we should receive should be related to helping healers with mana; not only because it befits our status as masters of mana and magic, but it also hearkens back to the old "water vending machine" thing back in Vanilla.

---------- Post added 2013-04-05 at 09:00 AM ----------

Originally Posted by Imnick

How you've decided to go with glyphs as several strong DPS options so that there is a choice is interesting but think that the balancing on that is unlikely to work, there are always going to be three mathematically superior choices from the selection provided

Perhaps he is on to something, that we need to re-evaluate what we expect the Major Glyphs to do. As it stands, the Glyph system is pretty superfluous outside of the vanity changes it offers; any glyph that is worth taking eventually becomes baseline or changed due to the power it offers, leaving us with a least bad choice among a number of terrible choices.

That being said, you're probably right and I suspect the problem is the current Arcane Mastery - I remember Swizzle pointed out, WAAAAAYY back in the Cata pre-patch, that Mana Adept was kind of like a more binary Torment the Weak: either it was so strong that keeping mana up at 100% became a top priority, or it was irrelevant.

Yeah, I know right? I sometimes wish more people would listen to me!!!! AHRIUHYWQEJGAHSJDGH.

Anyway, someone else in here also took my old idea for reworking Arcane's Mastery away from increasing damage based on mana and rather increasing the bonus damage of Arcane charges. I'm not upset people take my ideas, I doubt everyone remembers everything I say all the time, it actually makes me feel better that people share my ideas.

In any case, my vision for Arcane would be a removal of mana as a core mechanic and move it to a management of charges. Basically, I see it having the Mastery of a Sub Rogue but the playstyle of a Mut Rogue. I'll elaborate further if anyone is interested past that.

Yeah, I know right? I sometimes wish more people would listen to me!!!! AHRIUHYWQEJGAHSJDGH.

Anyway, someone else in here also took my old idea for reworking Arcane's Mastery away from increasing damage based on mana and rather increasing the bonus damage of Arcane charges. I'm not upset people take my ideas, I doubt everyone remembers everything I say all the time, it actually makes me feel better that people share my ideas.

In any case, my vision for Arcane would be a removal of mana as a core mechanic and move it to a management of charges. Basically, I see it having the Mastery of a Sub Rogue but the playstyle of a Mut Rogue. I'll elaborate further if anyone is interested past that.

Basically, Arcane Blast becomes our Mutilate building combo points (Arcane Charges in this case), and Arcane Barrage becomes our Envenom, using up said combo points. Now, the thing that would need to be done is to either introduce some sort of buff Arcane needs to maintain on itself ala the Envenom buff for Mutilate. In essence, your highest DPS would come from keeping up the buff AND using a full charge Arcane Barrage, but keeping up the buff is more important to your overall DPS than using Arcane Barrage. Now, here's where Mastery becomes fun. Since you're rotation would fluctuate (oh yeah, I forgot to mention Arcane Blast has a 10% chance of generating 2 Arcane Charges instead of just 1 per cast), if Mastery increases the bonus of each charge, you won't feel so penalized for using a lower charge amount per Barrage to maintain your buff.

As for this buff, I was considering making Arcane Missiles become the buff, with a duration dependent on number of charges used when Arcane Barrage was cast, which would allow each of your spells cast while active to fire off a wave of Arcane Missiles dealing X amount of damage and increasing either your secondary stats by Y% or your primary stat by Z%. The fear I have with this is that it removes a spell from Arcane's already shallow toolkit, which might make for a boring rotation again. If I went with this method, I would introduce that spell I mentioned a few months back for Arcane that deals increased damage per Arcane Charge, doesn't consume them but simply refreshes the duration, and is instant cast to be used while moving. This spell would be weaker than Barrage and Blast, but would simply be there to make movement not such a shit show for Arcane and adding possibly nice visual flair.

Basically, Arcane Blast becomes our Mutilate building combo points (Arcane Charges in this case), and Arcane Barrage becomes our Envenom, using up said combo points. Now, the thing that would need to be done is to either introduce some sort of buff Arcane needs to maintain on itself ala the Envenom buff for Mutilate. In essence, your highest DPS would come from keeping up the buff AND using a full charge Arcane Barrage, but keeping up the buff is more important to your overall DPS than using Arcane Barrage. Now, here's where Mastery becomes fun. Since you're rotation would fluctuate (oh yeah, I forgot to mention Arcane Blast has a 10% chance of generating 2 Arcane Charges instead of just 1 per cast), if Mastery increases the bonus of each charge, you won't feel so penalized for using a lower charge amount per Barrage to maintain your buff.

As for this buff, I was considering making Arcane Missiles become the buff, with a duration dependent on number of charges used when Arcane Barrage was cast, which would allow each of your spells cast while active to fire off a wave of Arcane Missiles dealing X amount of damage and increasing either your secondary stats by Y% or your primary stat by Z%. The fear I have with this is that it removes a spell from Arcane's already shallow toolkit, which might make for a boring rotation again. If I went with this method, I would introduce that spell I mentioned a few months back for Arcane that deals increased damage per Arcane Charge, doesn't consume them but simply refreshes the duration, and is instant cast to be used while moving. This spell would be weaker than Barrage and Blast, but would simply be there to make movement not such a shit show for Arcane and adding possibly nice visual flair.

An interesting array of ideas; but it's problematic because a) Envenom is tied to poison application rather than a maintenance buff (if anything, the model you're proposing is more like Inquisition for paladins) and b) the damage of Rogue combo builders isn't contingent upon how many combo points there are active on a target - whereas Arcane Charge is a ramp-up system.

I rather like the option of making Arcane play more like a Wizard from D3, where our toolkit is split between heavy hitting, high-mana abilities and smaller damage but mana-generating abilities.

But really, I think that the most achievable option given Blizzard's stance is resurrecting the conserve/burn rotation, albeit the one change I would make is making Arcane Barrage not consume charges while Arcane Power is active in order to incentivize its use during the burn phase.

I definitely like your idea of a Scorch-style spell that allows us to maintain Charges on the move. Call it Arcane Volley

As for this buff, I was considering making Arcane Missiles become the buff

I like this line of thought. Here's how I'd tweak it.
Arcane charges accumulate on the mage.
The buff REDUCES the mana cost of spells.
Arcane's core spells are modified based on the number of arcane charges on the target. AB cast time reduced per charge. AM gets additional missles per charge. AM castable while moving at max charges. AE causes an additional explosion on a damaged enemy. Etc.
Keep mastery unchanged.

An interesting array of ideas; but it's problematic because a) Envenom is tied to poison application rather than a maintenance buff (if anything, the model you're proposing is more like Inquisition for paladins) and b) the damage of Rogue combo builders isn't contingent upon how many combo points there are active on a target - whereas Arcane Charge is a ramp-up system.

Envenom places a buff on the Rogue which increases their application of poisons, and keeping it rolling is key to maxing DPS. Also, Rogue finishers are tied exactly to their combo points so you kinda lost me there.

Anyway, I really cannot in good faith argue for Arcane's Mastery staying how it is any longer. It simply doesn't work when one part of a class is completely different than the other two causing balancing issues out the ass.

Envenom places a buff on the Rogue which increases their application of poisons, and keeping it rolling is key to maxing DPS. Also, Rogue finishers are tied exactly to their combo points so you kinda lost me there.

Anyway, I really cannot in good faith argue for Arcane's Mastery staying how it is any longer. It simply doesn't work when one part of a class is completely different than the other two causing balancing issues out the ass.

Frost PoV

Alrighty time for my two bits.

I am only going to speak for frost mage here, because I don't want to claim the comfort or obsession for the other two specs that I have for frost. I know the specs, I can play them, and I certainly have opinions on them (and why I don't play them), but I am going to keep this frost-focused specifically because that's enough of an undertaking in its own right.

As stated in the OP: We cannot expect major revamps right now. Drastic changes may happen in 6.0, not now.

Frost has several key obstacles to address:

PvP Imbalance

Mastery Scaling

Haste Ceiling

Shatter Ceiling

Multidot Complex

Healer Stress

No new abilities need to be developed to overcome these obstacles. What I propose are relatively simple changes that will go a long way to fix the issues without ruining the flavor and theme of the spec itself. I took a lot of care to minimize the impact on the playstyle of the spec or PvP balance.

This gives haste a relatively easy to plan for benefit for all of our instant spells and gives us a cool visual benefit.

Each breakpoint adds 10% from the prior breakpoint. If 10% is too high, devs can easily tweak it down to 5%, or wherever it is most balanced.

Suggested Change #3: Ice FloesCurrently:Ice Floes
Instant 45 sec cooldown
Requires Mage
Requires level 15
Allows you to move while casting and channeling the next 2 Mage spells that have a base cast or channel time less than 4 sec. This spell may be cast while a cast time spell is in progress and is not on the global cooldown.Proposed:Ice Floes
25 sec cooldown
Requires Mage
Requires Level 15
Allows you to move while casting and channeling the next mage spell that has a base cast or channel time less than 4 sec. This spell will activate automatically upon movement during a cast or channel and does not trigger the global cooldown.

My reasoning is this frees up a lot more gameplay without simply allowing us to cast while moving. We get a "freebie" every now and then without feeling punished for getting out of the bad stuff on the ground.

This also dulls the pain of keeping the frostbolt debuff up during some things, i.e. Durumu. You'd be able to get 2 free casts on a maze phase, which is enough to keep the debuff up!

Reduces the cast time of your Frost Armor, Mage Armor, and Molten Armor spells by 1.5 sec, and increases the defensive effect of each Armor by an additional 10%.
Requires Level 25.Proposed:Increases the defensive effect of each Armor by an additional 10% and reduces damage taken from magical sources by 15% while any Armor is active.
Requires Level 25.

Frost is too bursty in PvP. Removing our control or the feel of the way shatter plays would destroy the theme of the spec. A revamp might solve this for 6.0, but that isn't in the cards right now. Simply removing this mastery buff to basically players-only (and RNG spikes in PvE) will even out the damage incredibly smoothly and provide a good reason for us to like mastery in PvE.

A big problem to frost scaling would be overcome with these changes. The goal isn't to buff our damage, but it's to correct our scaling issues that make gearing up a constant anxiety trip. All numbers above can of course be tweaked and would need to be playtested and mathed out by someone with more than my capabilities.

OK, I'm not ok with you here.
#1 - frost bomb don't need to be a dot. but all bomb need to do less damage.
#2 - For Icy veins, I would prefer they keep the 20% haste but made baseline you're system for IL (and maybe other).
#3 - I really don't like auto-activation, especially for Ice Flow with it you're sure it will be on CD when you really need it.
#4 - No, don't change Mastery. Frost is making more damage on Frozen target. PvP balance isn't break because of it (it's blizzard job to make it work).
#5 - Why not simply adding interaction with FoF ??